Work(out) from Home

I’ve been doing a series of home workouts since March 17, 2020. My gym closed as a non-essential business as part of the CoViD-19 shelter-in-place mandate here in SF. The anticipated end date of the mandate was marked as April 7th, 2020; that’s tomorrow.

The short is, that’s not how it worked out. On March 31, another mandate was released superseding the first and extending the date to May 3rd. Despite anticipating an extension, this was a hard truth to face. For me, going to the gym and working out has become a meditative component of my life, and as an unemployed human it’s also one of the key pieces that gives my day structure.

So, I workout from home. I do what I can.

“I’m sending pic after picture, I’mma get you fired.” — Lyrical Genius

I don’t think SF is going to be unique with it’s lengthened quarantine procedure. So I figured I’d share what I’ve been doing, and how I go about making my fitness decisions with these constraints.

First and foremost, I set a structure and I stick to it. I do something physically exhausting everyday for at least an hour. That doesn’t have to be your agreement, but you should give yourself something to adhere to and be accountable for it. Consider the possible adjustments you can make to fine-tune your fitness schedule:

• Frequency — How often will you work out? Every day, every other, once every three days?
• Duration — How long will you exercise each workout? Fifteen, thirty, sixty minutes?
• Intensity — How hard will you be working out? What does your rest time look like?
• Type — What sort of workout will you be doing? Are you favoring strength, endurance, flexibility?

The first two, frequency and duration are easiest to dial in based on your experience. As a beginner or someone returning to regular exercise after a while, I suggest no less than once every three days for at least fifteen to twenty minutes. If you’re used to exercising regularly, I’d say every other or every day, varying the workouts so that you give your body proper rest for recovery and regeneration.

Intensity is going to be a very subjective component. Monitor yourself, make sure you breath through the exercise. Holding your breath and spurting it out is not going to be healthy. The goal here is to sweat a bit and get your heart rate up, but not to over do it. If you think about a scale from 1 to 10, where 1 is watching Netflix on the couch and 10 is passed out from physical exhaustion, aim for a 6 to 7 at the peak of your workout.

I would say take type out of the equation. Specifically, I recommend you take ten to twenty minutes everyday just to stretch. It doesn’t have to be yoga, but you should be stretching your body. Otherwise for at-home exercises, you’ll be focused pretty heavily on strength training anyway, but you’ll be building endurance as well. That said, you can definitely switch things up to favor cardio and endurance training.

The Specifics

Now to focus on the body. When I thought about my own new routine, I considered the body in five main parts.

1. The heart and lungs, which means some cardio/endurance training.
2. The core for stability and strength.
3. The chest for strength.
4. The back for strength and stability.
5. The legs for strength and stability.

Cardio Training

For my cardio training, I run. It’s new for me, and I’m progressing well enough. I resisted running for a while because it confused me; more specifically, when I think of ‘running,’ I’m really thinking of sprinting, which I definitely can’t sustain as an exercise. Running is more of “slightly faster jogging”, or generally anything faster than 6 mph. My friend puts it well in that, running or jogging, you shouldn’t be out of breath or in pain. You should be able to keep that pace for a bit, and even carry on some light conversation. I recommend listening to music that’s all around the same tempo.

If you can’t run — for whatever reason — kick up the jams. Put on your favorite clothes (or nothing at all) and dance. And when I say “dance” I mean really feel yourself for a good twenty minutes to half an hour. Do everything you’re afraid to do at the club, or in front of others. Give in to your primal urges and move as your body tells you to.

Or follow a Zumba class on YouTube. Whatever.

Strength Training

There are three areas I focus on when considering at-home strength training — chest, back, and legs. Starting from the bottom up.

Your legs are key to your mobility and a good portion of your functional strength. As far as leg exercises go, there’s a few decent options to consider:

• Squats. Squats, squats, squats. If you can squat, you should squat. If you can’t squat because you don’t know how, learn how to squat. The basics are — exhale going down, keep a flat back, don’t let your knees splay too much, and push into your heels. Practice by literally sitting down and standing up using just your heels and eventually progress to ‘sitting down without a chair.’
  Definitely check YouTube for proper form tutorials and common pitfalls; the most frequent mistakes I’ve seen in myself and others are curved backs and holding your breath the whole time. Also, I wouldn’t bother with the whole “ass to grass” approach; it increases your time under tensions but also stresses your knees more. Instead, just squat to where your butt is about level with your knees, and hold it if you want longer time under tension (which helps with training the muscles).

This is great squat form. Lower back remains neutral, butt doesn’t go below knees. Also those tights are great.

• Step ups are also a great exercise that will help both train strength in your quads and give an option for cardio training. If you have a sturdy chair (or box) that you can comfortable step onto, use that. Otherwise, try finding stairs in your building. If you have to use stairs and are average height (5'6" for women, 5'10" for men) or taller, I recommend two stairs at a time. For strength training, go slower and make sure you are pressing into your heel on the step up, and landing on the toe/ball of your foot stepping down. You can wear a backpack or carry a bag full of stuff to add additional weight and resistance for this exercise.
• Gluteal bridges. I recommend looking this up, but essentially you’ll lie on your back with your knees bent. You’ll thrust your pelvis into the air, like you’re into it. At the top of the thrust, you’ll squeeze your glutes, like your into it, and hold.
• Wall sits. This is like a plank, but for your butt and lower back. You’ll aim for three major points of contact with the wall (butt, upper back, and crown of your head) and keeping your knees at a right angle. Hold the position for as long as you can.

Your chest is useful for functional strength and will help balance work done on your back. That said, for most people while your chest is maybe the easiest to train, it’s also the easiest to overtrain. The key exercise here is a pushup and there are SO many ways to do pushups that they are quickly very accessible.

• Standard pushups like you’ve seen in the movies. The key here is to keep your elbows from splaying outward as you go down to the floor. You want to keep your elbows close to your body, keep your shoulders slightly back from above your elbows, and keep your palms flat and about a hands distance away from your chest on the floor. As you push up, don’t lock your elbows; that will do damage in the long term and definitely contributes to over training. Otherwise, one of the biggest tips here is to remember that your body is great at cheating, so tighten your core muscles as much as you can during this exercise while maintaining regular breathing.
• Assisted pushups come in many varieties. If you need to build strength toward doing standard pushups, consider doing pushups at an angle. Angling the motion will reduce the body weight you’ll be resisting. You can do pushups against a wall, and you can slowly progress to pushups against a chair or a table. Eventually you can start doing standard pushups.
  Separately, you can start in the standard pushup position but make your knees a point of contact with the floor instead of your feet (this was previously known as a “girl pushup” but that’s absurd, it’s an assisted pushup and it’s for anyone who wants or needs it).
• Once you’re satisfied and can do ten to fifteen standard pushups in a row, consider varying those as well. Having your hands close together on the ground will engage your triceps a lot more and give a tighter squeeze on your chest. Doing “explosive” pushups where you do a little launch off the ground trains power and speed in these predominantly slow muscles. Doing a standard pushup with one of your legs raised in the air will engage your core more and train balance.

The bottom line here is that pushups are for everyone. Buyer beware though, overtraining your chest without adequate attention to your back and legs will wreak havoc on your posture and potentially cause a lot of very painful nerve inflammation. Which brings us to the back, at last.

Your back is remarkably important but also perhaps the hardest to train at home. It’s almost as important as your legs for functional strength, and does a ton of work for stability and posture. You’ll want to consider your back in two major pieces, upper and lower.

Your upper back is dominated by the latimus dorsi muscles, which create that triangular shape you see when I’m walking in front of you. Your lower back is dominated by your erector spinae muscles, which help your posture and keep your curvature healthy. Flatly, the best exercise for your upper back will be pull-ups and their variants.

• If you have a pull-up bar, doing pullups (wide grip, over-hand) and chin-ups (close grip, underhand) will be the best operating procedure. Chin-ups are going to be “easier” because they’ll engage more of your biceps and share the load across more muscles, so you can start there. You can also start by practicing hanging on the bar, or doing half motions where you’re starting to pull but it’ll feel mostly like a shrug.
• If you don’t have a pull-up bar, the next best thing will be rows. For rows, you’ll want a sturdy broom handle/curtain rod/pole to place between two sturdy chairs/tables/piles of cinderblocks. From there, you’ll lay beneath the pole, grip it over or underhand, and pull yourself up with your feet staying on the floor. There are a few other ways to do this exercise, using towels, door frames, etc. YouTube will be your friend here.

Arnold can do it. You can do it.

• Working the lower back is actually a lot about just actively engaging those muscles. Wall sits are good for this. Additionally, you can do a form of tricep exercise that will also engage your lower back. Start laying on your stomach, with your hands placed face-down just at your nipples. Keeping your elbows close to your body, push against the ground, arching your back. This exercise is great because it’s training two smaller muscle groups (triceps and your lower back) while also training for flexibility. This looks a lot like cobra pose (if you want a reference) but you’ll be aiming to make it more an exercise rather than a stretch by not pushing as far into the stretch and repeating it multiple times.

Try to keep your hips closer to the ground for the exercise versus the stretch.

Core Training

The last component here is training your core. The fun secret is that in proper at-home exercise, you should be focusing on tightening your core in every exercise to prevent your body from cheating the resistance. You’ll be working your abs in most of the exercises I’ve already listed, but I find it helpful to give a bit of specific attention to your core to build additional stability and strength.

A quick search for “core workouts” provides a myriad of options. Sit ups, crunches, reverse crunches, leg raises, flutter kicks, planks, side planks… the list seems endless.

That feels daunting, but really it means that if you don’t like a specific exercise, just don’t do it. There are countless other options to engage your core, and they’ll all be helpful and they’ll all be tough. Find what you can tolerate most (or even enjoy) and stick with it. If we’re talking about months and months of at-home training, you’ll want to vary it up so that your muscles don’t get overly familiar with the motions, but for now, just make this something you’re willing and able to do.

I will give a few things to specifically consider in your core exercises.

• Breathe regularly. Don’t hold your breath and let it all out in one burst randomly. Breathe through the exercise. Breathing regularly on it’s own engages the core in a specific way.
• Focus on your core. If your core work hurts in your hips, it’s because you’re engaging your hips. Re-evaluate your stance, look up some examples, and try again squeezing and tightening your core.
• Your core has three major sections: upper, lower, and obliques. Consider giving love to all three sections with whatever exercises you favor.
• If you hate core workouts, dancing with a lot of gyration and body rolls is a decent stand in and will also be a cardio thing.

“Never underestimate the power of body rolls.”

Parting Thoughts

This is a ton of information. Give it a glance, look up some references, and come back and glance some more. Google will be your friend here, as will your intuition. Listen to your body, and rest when it tells you to rest.

Lastly, a great starting place that I’ve used multiple times in the past is darebee.com. It’s a website with a ton of curated at-home workouts using minimal to no additional equipment.

You can do this.

Stay tuned, I’ll be going into finer detail on these points as the days move along.